Understanding the causal association between skills and productivity is essential for designing effective training programs. This paper evaluates an intervention aimed at boosting leadership and communication skills among store managers and sales associates from a large Latin American retailer....

Using data from the World Bank's Enterprise Survey, this paper explores the determinants of firms' training decisions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The share of production for the export market and the size of the firm are key factors; training programs are not prevalent in all sectors. In...

How skills acquired in vocational education and training (VET) affect wages and employment is not clear. We develop and estimate a search and matching model for workers with a VET degree. Workers differ in interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills, while firms require and value different...

In-firm training is a crucial innovative activity in modern knowledge-based economies which face increasing global competition and rapidly changing technology. Nevertheless, there are few studies which look at in-firm training in the Caribbean. This study uses the World Bank Enterprise Survey...

In this paper we investigate the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market outcomes. We combine data for Italy over almost three decades from longitudinal social security records on a random sample of around 1 million private sector employees with the universe of...

This paper brings new evidence on the impact of The Peruvian Job Youth Training Program (Projoven). Compared with prior evaluations of the program, this one has several advantages. This is the first experimental impact evaluation of Projoven, and also the first to measure impacts over a longer...

Teenage pregnancy in the Dominican Republic represents a persistent development challenge. This paper uses data from a randomized impact evaluation of the youth training program Juventud y Empleo, which includes soft-skills training, to examine its impact on teenage pregnancy. We find that the...

This paper presents the results of a randomized controlled trial on the long-term impacts of a youth training program. The empirical analysis estimates labor market impacts six years after the training - including long-term labor market trajectories of young people - and, it is one of the first...

The apprenticeship system is the most important source of formal post-secondary training in Germany. Using German register data - the IAB Employment Sample - we find that apprentices staying with their training firm after graduation have longer first-job durations but not higher wages than...